Call for Papers

The Qurʾanic Linguistics Research Group

Inaugural International Conference

14th -15th March, 2023

In collaboration with SOAS Centre of Islamic Studies

Call for Papers

The Qurʾānic Linguistics Research Group (QLG) is delighted to announce that it will be hosting its Inaugural International Conference on Qurʾānic linguistics in collaboration with SOAS Centre of Islamic Studies on 14th-15th March 2023. The conference will be held online via Zoom.

QLG is a group of Quranic studies scholars whose research focuses on the dynamics and mechanisms of the Qurʾān as a communicative text from a linguistic standpoint. We aim to promote academic excellence in this study area through various research activities. QLG’s Inaugural International Conference will bring together academics worldwide to showcase the latest advances in Qur’anic linguistics research.

Conference Themes

We welcome particularly papers applying modern linguistic theories to the Qur’anic text in the following areas:

  1. Application of linguistic theories and approaches to analysing the Qurʾānic text, including, Pragmatics, Relevance Theory, Speech Acts Theory, Text Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and linguistic analyses of coherence and cohesion issues.
  2. Discourse analysis: Linguistic analysis of Qurʾānic discourse types such as narratives, dialogues, polemics, and hymns.
  3. Linguistic analysis of Qurʾānic themes and textual structures.
  4. Qurʾānic grammar and syntax, including particles, issues in agreement, word order, sentence structure and types of verbs.
  5. Analyses of phonology and morphology in the Qur’an.
  6. Time and aspect issues (e.g. gnomic present).
  7. Linguistic and grammatical material in Qurʾānic exegeses.
  8. Qur’anic material in modern and classical Arabic linguistics and philology.
  9. Semantics, including lexemes, lexical units and fields, homonymy, polysemy and Lexical Networks.
  10. Various approaches to the linguistic analysis of Qurʾān translations.
  11. Comparison of grammatical and rhetorical structures in Semitic texts, including Biblical Hebrew and the Qurʾān.
  12. The impact of Qurʾānic variant readings on the production of meaning and grammatical structures.
  13. Qurʾānic hermeneutics from a linguistic point of view.
  14. Computational and corpus linguistic approaches to analysing the Qur’anic text.
  1. Linguistics inʿUlūm al-Qurʾān and Uṣūl al-Fiqh.

Abstracts must be submitted by October 3rd, 2022.

To submit an abstract, follow the link: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=LrXKu76f1kOi859mxD3yaNo8d1PasXVHnbpwuZi0JqtUMkkzMEszOVpSMlc3VUxVR0RPT0kzOFNPRS4u

To contact us email: s.m.al-shlool@swansea.ac.uk and qlg.conf@gmail.com

Publication of Conference Papers

A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Qur’anic Studies published by Edinburgh University Press and Linguistica Online. Subject to peer review, articles will be selected for publications based on academic quality, innovation and contribution of new knowledge to the field.

The deadline for submitting the complete papers to the conference organisers is January 15th, 2023.

Conference Organising Committee:

Dr Salwa El-Awa (Swansea University)

Dr Yehudit Dror (University of Haifa)

Dr Nora Eggen (Independent Scholar, Oslo)

Dr Orhan Elmaz (University of St Andrews)

Dr Muhammad Taghian (Helwan University)

Dr Abdelmadjid Ben Habib (University of Tlemcen)

Dr Shuruq Naguib (Lancaster University)

Ms Safaa Al-Shlool (Swansea University)